


Lace And Paper Flowers

by TreacleTart



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Community: HPFT, Gen, Harry Potter Next Generation, Next-Gen, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-10
Updated: 2016-04-10
Packaged: 2018-06-01 13:05:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 508
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6520939
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TreacleTart/pseuds/TreacleTart
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lace and paper flowers, that's what your mother always said you were made of.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Lace And Paper Flowers

  
Beautiful Banner by beyond the rain @ TDA!

Lace and paper flowers, that’s what your mother always said you were made of. Delicate like a porcelain doll, ready to crack under the slightest of pressure. She cited your fear of darkness, your dislike for firewhiskey, and your desire for everything to be perfect as proof. What she never stopped to understand was why.

How could you find the words to explain that it was her screams of terror ripping through the wee hours of the morning that made you fear the absence of light? How could you tell her that it was your father’s constant inebriation that made it impossible for you to stomach the smell of alcohol? How could you break her heart by telling her that it was your father’s irrational, inconsolable anger that caused you to try and smooth everything over? The truth is you’d been destroyed by a war fought ages before you were born.

For far too long, your home was a minefield and you were a shield constantly protecting your younger siblings from the explosions. A broken plate. A soiled diaper. The wrong choice of words. All of them enough to cause a detonation that would leave everyone peppered with shrapnel.

Years of panic and fear have left you with a hair pin trigger, but instead of bursting outwards, you silently implode. Locking it inside, you allow no one to see the inferno raging within the confines of your small frame. You gloss everything over with polite smiles and batted eyelashes. The fissures forming in your soul are the only evidence.

That’s how you know you can’t be made of such fragile stuff. Lace would have been decimated long ago, torn into miniscule fragments by the ferocity of your world. Paper flowers would’ve carbonized leaving only ash to swirl in the tempest. Porcelain would’ve been pulverized into an unrecognizable powder, left to coat the broken remnants of your soul.

Ghosts of war and stale firewhiskey have molded you into much tougher materials. The optimistic, excitable, soft, brittle little girl who left for Hogwarts has long since died, but you have risen like a phoenix from her ashes, stoic, iron hearted, jaded to the harshness that surrounds you. Your name means Victory and like your parents before you, you’ve fought your battles and won.

You have been molded into someone unconquerable, indomitable, invincible. The walls that you’ve built around you are is impregnable as the spells that protect Hogwarts, scaring away people before they even attempt to approach.

It’s only in the earliest hours of the morning before the sun has risen that you allow your walls to lower. The specter of your mother screaming haunts you, looming over you like a dementor, draining what little bit of happiness you’ve managed. Memories of your father’s volatile explosions ache like the cursed scars that decorate his face. It is in these moments that you think you might finally understand them.

In those moments you are certain that you never will be lace or paper flowers.

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted on HPFF under the pen name TreacleTart
> 
> Written for The HPFF Quill & Ink Challenge - March 2016


End file.
